Sixteen Maybe Less
by hadaka
Summary: Maybe a little more.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Not mine.

**Warning:** This is **yaoi**.

**Summary:** Maybe a little more.

* * *

"We should stop seeing each other," says Sena.

He won't look up.

"Ah," says Kazuki. He's looking down at his glass of beer, and, for some reason, thinking about the all the paperwork that's waiting for him back at the station and how he should probably go in early tomorrow morning.

"I'm sorry," says Sena.

He's obviously just come from work. The satchel next to his chair is full of tests waiting to be graded and his tie actually has a smudge of chalk on it. For weeks, Sena's been rushing to school and back, clutching evaluations, attendance sheets, a lot of other things Kazuki remembers the newbie teachers from his own childhood holding onto for dear life as they ran between homeroom and the staffroom. Sena has the same look now as they did then, all stress and hurry and a little panic.

Except Kazuki doesn't remember ever having any teachers who looks the way Sena does, with his loosened tie and flushed face and long, long eyelashes.

"I see," says Kazuki, because he can't think of anything else.

Sena won't look at him, and Kazuki has to pick his beer up very, very carefully so as not to shatter the glass.

He asks "He waiting at home for you?" without being able to stop himself.

Oddly, Sena doesn't flinch. He keeps his eyes on the complimentary tea in front of him and only presses his lips into a thin line.

What else is there left to say? Sena's made his choice. Took him long enough—nearly a year. A year of weekly dates assigned by schedule and rushed meals and clinging, desperate morning afters. Of sitting at home on the Friday that isn't his and getting drunk in front of the TV wondering if Sena's at dinner or in a cab or in someone else's bed.

It's better this way.

_Don't go,_ Kazuki almost says, but he's finishing the last of his glass of beer and Sena's standing up.

Out of nowhere, Kazuki's struck by the memory of watching Sena stand up countless times before. When they were in high school, Sena's skinny shoulders hunched over the desk in front of him until the bell, and then that skinny back stretching itself out under its shirt as Sena got up to bow the teacher out. At practice, or in the locker room, the Deimon red and the white 21 pulled taut over protective gear as Eyeshield 21 stood up go out onto the field. When they were in university and Kazuki got to look across the field at the opposing bench and see Sena, wearing Enma's colors and his signature 21, getting up to bump arms with Enma's Kongo and Enma's Mizumachi just before he came out onto the field and led his team to an underdog victory over Saikyoudai by a margin of one.

But that was a long time ago. And neither of them are kids anymore.

Outside the bar, just as Sena's turning away to catch a taxi, Kazuki takes his arm.

He doesn't care who's looking.

"Come home with me." _Please please please._ "Just for tonight."

It's a terrible idea. Kazuki isn't drunk enough to think that he can get through this with any kind of dignity if Sena comes home with him. It would be too easy to take Sena in his arms, clutching that smaller body to his, his mouth in Sena's hair, _Don't go, I don't care what I have to do, just don't go._

To throw away all pride and self-respect.

"I can't," says Sena. He's looking away from Kazuki, still won't look at Kazuki, as if he's determined that Kazuki should no longer exist in his eyes. "I'm sorry."

Kazuki lets go.

The street is wet and the lights of the bars and stores glistening with rain. When a taxi does pull up, Kazuki can see his reflection and the reflection of the lights behind him in the windows.

_Good-bye, Kazuki,_ says Sena, but so softly that Kazuki can't hear him, only see the words on his lips.

Then Sena gets into the taxi and it slides out into traffic.

And Kazuki watches Sena leave.

Without looking back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** Not mine.

**Warning:** This is **yaoi**. Also **language**.

* * *

For a while, Kazuki is busy at work with a homicide case and it's not as hard as he'd supposed it'd be to pretend nothing's happened.

It's only really difficult now and then, like on the Wednesdays and Saturdays when he finds himself sitting on his couch with one unopened beer and one unopened sweet peach drink in front of him and the latest match on TV, watching the clock and waiting for something that he knows isn't going to happen. Or on the two Sundays of the month when he's used to waking up early because it's his turn to go pick up breakfast before coming back to his apartment and lazing away the rest of the afternoon in bed. Or on those mornings he's jarred awake by the next door neighbor's brats crashing and banging their way down the stairs and he lays in bed, still groggy and near enough sleep to hear someone in the shower who isn't there, and waits for the arms around his neck, the kiss, the familiar _I have to go I love you don't forget to eat_.

Conversations happen like ghosts.

_Jyuumonji, are you feeling well?_

_ I'm fine, Captain, just a cold._

_ Jyuumonji-san, you look awful. Did you break up with your girlfriend or something?_

_ Or something._

_ Oi, Kazu, you look like shit._

_ Thanks._

And of course the worst part is how empty the apartment is now, just like all the magazines and self-help books say. Which is weird, because there was never much in his apartment to begin with—and even less than nothing of _his_—and now all that's left is the memory of a voice.

_Kazuki, you need to shave._

_ Nnnn._

_ Do you think you can get the weekend off?_ An embarrassed hesitation. _I mean—it's just that it's a holiday at school, and I thought...if you weren't...it's just that Mom told me to come home, and I thought—_

_ Yeah._

Ten days in, Kazuki gets the feeling that he's in trouble. The offhanded questions of his coworkers and fellow detectives are turning into real concern, and both Toganou and Kuroki are calling every day. He wonders what he must look like to provoke all this worry, but he doesn't want to look in a mirror and see what stares back. So he sleeps a lot and works a lot and drinks more than he should. At home, by himself, because the youngest detective in the department shouldn't be seen getting shitfaced every night in public.

He figures he's doing what all the TV shows call _having an emotional breakdown_ and what a little voice in his head identifies as _falling apart_, but there's little he can think of to do about it.

Pathetic, really. Most people got over this shit in high school. Kazuki's a little disgusted with himself.

Because the reality is that he's been dumped—passed over—and if he had any self respect he'd man up, get over it, and move on with his life.

He will. Sooner or later. Because how long can a face linger in someone's heart, really? How long loss?

_One month for every year of the relationship,_ he remembers reading somewhere. Except he's kind of fucked, then, because at the very least it's been twelve years since freshman year of high school, and he can't really remember what it's like to not be in love with Kobayakawa Sena.

So he's fucked himself over.

Twenty days in, Kazuki wakes up one morning on his couch, in the clothes he wore yesterday and with seven new messages including one from his father on his voicemail, and knows this can't go on.

"I love you," he says, but it's to an empty room and there's no answer and Kazuki figures all there's left to do is get over it or stick his service revolver in his mouth.

He never was a quitter.

"Sorry," he adds, a little more quietly, and it's odd how much it hurts, apologizing to someone who isn't there for deciding to move on from him, and then he gets up and takes a shower.

Thirty-one days after Sena left, Kazuki looks up one night while out after a lead on an attempted murder and sees Hiruma Yoichi looking at him from the opposite side of the street.

The hatred that comes up the back of his throat like bile literally chokes him.

Hiruma. Hair cut short and black, but almost nothing else different. Standing there in a suit that probably cost more than a year of Kazuki's salary, like he's not the dirtiest, most corrupt businessman in Tokyo today. If there's anything left of the Hiruma who used to exist, the one who cursed and kicked and threatened a team of high school amateurs all the way to the Christmas Bowl, the Hiruma who Kazuki had at one point almost _respected_, he's nowhere to be found in that tall, cold-eyed figure under the traffic light.

But none of that matters, because all Kazuki sees is the man who took Sena from him.

"Jyuumonji? Hey, Jyuumonji. You listening?"

Hiruma. Fucking Hiruma. Always Hiruma. Hiruma in high school, Hiruma in university, Hiruma Hiruma Hiruma. Taking up half Sena's time, half Sena's bed, half Sena's _life_.

Kazuki has hated Hiruma almost as long as he's loved Sena.

"What are you looking at? Wha—whoa, whoa, kid, careful. You got any idea who you're trying to pick a fight with? Come on, stop it—he's OC's problem, not ours."

He can't help it. Eleven days ago he made up his mind to let go of Sena and survive this, but here is Hiruma standing in front of him and the hatred overwhelms him, like nothing else he's ever experienced, and he's glaring at Hiruma from thirty meters away, almost baring his teeth, and he knows without having to look that what's in his face right now is _murder_, pure and—

—and it takes him a second to realize that Hiruma is giving him the _exact same look_.

The anger is gone as abruptly as it came. From thirty meters away, he watches Hiruma's face mirror his. The recognition. The shock. The thought process, almost identical in both of them.

And realization.

"FUCK," shouts Kazuki, so loudly that his senior standing next to him staggers back. "FUCK."

It makes Kazuki happier than it should to see that Hiruma Yoichi, mouth open and eyes dilating, is just as furious as he is.

Then Hiruma ceases to exist, because Kazuki is running toward his car.


End file.
